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Nin, I have so much to teach you.”
    How long, on that day, did Liz imagine it would take for them to become romantically involved? Six or eight weeks perhaps—long enough for him to process his breakup with Serena, process being a word Jasper himself, unlike either of her college boyfriends, actually used in reference to his own emotions. But apparently little processing was necessary. Liz felt no compulsion to keep a close eye on Jasper at the party, which made it all the more soul crushing when he left with the host’s sister Natalie, who was a junior at NYU.
    A rebound, Liz told herself. Natural enough, and perhaps even best to get it out of his system. Surely what was obvious to Liz—and to others, too, there’d even been an older female editor at the magazine who’d murmured to her, “You and Jasper Wick would be so cute together”—would soon become visible to Jasper as well.
    Alas, Jasper and Natalie were a couple for two years, and it took only a few weeks of their courtship for Liz to revert to her Serena-era patterns with Jasper: She was his lunch companion, intermittently his jogging partner, his professional sounding board—she would copyedit and proofread the pitches he was crafting in the hope of getting a front-of-the-book piece in the magazine—and she was also his confidante, helping to parse his concerns about Natalie’s immaturity or his irritation at his roommate, who would, while stoned, consume Jasper’s tortillas and peanut butter. Once when Natalie was at her parents’ house in Phoenix, Liz and Jasper drank many beers together on a Wednesday night at a dive bar near Times Square, and, unable to bear it any longer, Liz blurted out, “But what about us ? I thought you pictured us as a couple!”
    Jasper seemed startled. “That’s what you want?” he said.
    “Of course it’s what I want!” Liz said.
    “Part of me wants it, too.” Jasper’s tone was pained rather than flirtatious. “But we’d be the real thing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. You’re such an important friend that I don’t want to risk losing you.”

    When they left the bar, before parting ways in Port Authority, they stood on the corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue and continued talking; there were between them always an infinite number of subjects to be addressed and dissected, mulled over and mocked and revisited. It was a windy March night, and the wisps of Liz’s brown hair that had slipped from her ponytail blew around her forehead and cheeks.
    Abruptly, Jasper said, “Your hair is all crazy tonight.” He stepped toward her, his hand out. But at the same time, Liz raised her own arm and pushed away her hair, and as she did so, Jasper withdrew his hand and took a step back. There were countless hours—or maybe more than hours, maybe weeks and days—that Liz devoted to replaying this nonaction, this absence of contact. Because her hair hadn’t been that crazy, it was frequently slipping from a rubber band, so obviously he had been about to touch her, about to kiss her even and perhaps to become her boyfriend and the love of her life. Had she intercepted him out of habit, because it was her hair and her head? Because she didn’t believe in kissing the boyfriends of other girls? Or because she was, in some instinctive way, intent on wrecking her own destiny?
    On the night he didn’t touch her, Liz and Jasper both were twenty-four years old. For the next six years, they never kissed; they even slept in the same bed twice, at a friend’s aunt’s house in Sag Harbor and another time on a road trip to visit Jasper’s sister at the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, Jasper cycled through additional girlfriends—after Natalie there was Gretchen, and after Gretchen there was Elise, and after Elise there was Katherine—and Liz halfheartedly went out with other guys but never for longer than a few months. Jasper would ask about such men in great detail, and once, when Liz was first